We’re celebrating the inclusion of the lobster emoji in the new release of Emoji 11.0 from the Unicode Consortium by adopting it.
There is no reward for donating besides the warm glow of knowing you’ve helped support an organization that is the source of so much error handling in our code. (Well, Unicode is a 501(c)3 charity, so if you itemize you can deduct that on your US taxes.)
GoFundMe disburses directly to charities on the 25th of the month, so we’re only going to run for 11 days until late on 2018-02-24. I’ll turn it off whenever I’m going to bed (US Central time, GMT-6), so don’t wait until the deadline to get your donation in!
Though we expect to reach the $1,000 Silver level for adoption, every single dollar we raise will be directly donated to Unicode regardless of how much we raise.
Stretch goal: if we reach $5,000 we can be the sole Gold-level sponsor. Stretch reward: still just the warm glow. But won’t that be pretty funny?
https://www.gofundme.com/lobsters-emoji-adoption
Edit: Silver! At noon on day one! Really glad to see this. I’ve bumped up the target to our stretch goal of $5,000 for gold-level sponsorship. That Maine Senator is going to be so jelly.
Edit: At @jcs’s suggestion, I’ve added a progress meter to the homepage and recent/newest stories pages. Added: It has an id tag, so you can adblock it with lobste.rs###emojifundraiser if you don’t want to see it.
The excellent lobster drawing is courtesy @goodger. It is off-center because the gofundme ajax image editor just hangs instead of editing the crop so… uh… I mean, it’s a design aesthetic.
And thanks to @355e3b for suggesting the idea!
Now that we’ve passed $1K - can we beat the $5K?
If we’re trying to shoot for 5k we should at least let Maine know.
As a European, I honestly prefer us to have it :)
I’d say we go for it, and offer them to take over the gold spot for a 10k donation to Unicode instead. :-)
Done. Now, how do I sponsor a boiling water emoji campaign?
Slowly. You sponsor it slowly.
In Bitcoin.
Wow… maybe tone down the shade of red in the progress bar?
The color signals “WARNING ALL ACCOUNTS COMPROMISED!”, even though it’s consistent with the color of boiled lobster…
Sure. It was the standard
#ac130dthat’s used around the site, but I’ve dimmed it to#740804.Alternatively, change the bar into a conga line of lobster emojis.
Sadly I don’t think the actual emoji is released yet?
Could use the one referenced here -> https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/5647842/lobster-emoji-issue/ maybe?
Coming from the DM, I had a hard time finding the gofundme link. Just in case others are as dense as I am, here it is: https://www.gofundme.com/lobsters-emoji-adoption
It took me a moment to realize the link is the story link for this story. I’m just not used to seeing the
announcetag on a link!Or on a primarily text post!
Thanks for arranging this! It’s going pretty fast :)
What will the Unicode organization do with this money? Their basic job of standardizing character mappings doesn’t seem super resource intensive.
Turns out it’s pretty expensive! There’s anthropological work they do, they gotta fund font development, etc.
We have some generous crustaceans here!
Yes we should also put up other causes throughout the year. Preferably amusing but also good causes. Lobster emoji is just the beginning!
I dropped a bit on it, good luck everyone <3
We’ve reached the end of the campaign and donated enough to reach the Silver level of adoption. GoFundMe is scheduled to donate the money today via PayPal Giving Fund. After their fees, it should be a little under $2,000. I’m going to email Unicode on Monday morning (2018-02-26) to arrange the link and will update when that’s live.
Thanks, everyone. I’m thrilled that we’re giving back so much to an organization we all rely on.
Desipite GoFundMe listing Unicode as a “Certified Charity” with a jaunty checkmark, they now say Unicode is not even enrolled into the program and will have to sign up with PayPal to receive the funds. I’m disgusted by how deceptive they’ve been, that they apparently would have silently sat on the funds indefinitely if I hadn’t followed up, and that instead of cutting a check they’re making work for the charity. They say the earliest Unicode can receive the funds is now March 25th. I am following up up closely to try to expedite this process as much as possible.
I’ve been unable to move things along any faster with GoFundMe. They claim they’ve reached out to someone, somehow at Unicode but refuse to take or give me any details (so I could connect them to the person at Unicode I’ve been talking to for weeks to set this up, perhaps) because I’m not affiliated with Unicode. A small improvement is that if Unicode prefers not to sign up with PayPal Giving Fund, GoFundMe will at least fall back to sending them a check, though they’ll delay things up to 90 days (no justification given, of course). I’ve set a recurring reminder in my task-tracking system to check on this every two weeks until it’s done and will continue updates here.
Success! Unicode has received our donation of $1,863.77. I’ve confirmed with them what we’d like added to the list of sponsors and that should happen in the next few days. I asked them to link to
https://lobste.rs/about#emojiand will put up an anchor tag with some text on the about page this weekend.